Nobody tells you, when you decide to write a book, how much of the work will be work nobody ever sees.
Not the writing itself — that is the part people romanticise. I mean the infrastructure. The unglamorous, necessary, invisible architecture that has to exist before a manuscript can become something you hold in your hands. Before it can have a spine and a cover and a place on a shelf.
That is what this campaign is funding. And I think you deserve to know exactly what that looks like.
The goal is $5,500. Here is where that money goes:
Cover art: $2,000. I am working with an illustrator I trust deeply, front, spine, back, plus the campaign assets. A cover is not decoration. It is the first thing a reader sees and the last reason they decide to pick something up. Getting it right matters more than almost anything else on this list.
Copy editing: $2,000. A copy editor is not someone who fixes your typos. A copy editor is the person who makes sure the book you meant to write is the book that exists on the page. They catch the places where a sentence says one thing and means another. They protect the reader from the author’s blind spots. This is not optional. It is the difference between a manuscript and a book.
ISBNs: $297. Every edition of a book, paperback, hardcover, ebook, needs its own ISBN to exist in retail and library systems. You cannot be found without them.
Copyright registration: $65. Exactly what it says.
Kickstarter fees: roughly $400. The platform takes a percentage. This is the cost of using the infrastructure.
Printing buffer: $500. For the print proof, the test run, the margin of error before the real run goes to press.
That is the $5,500.
You will notice something missing from that list.
My time is not on it. The months of writing, the chapters drafted and redrafted, the worldbuilding that predates this campaign entirely, the nights spent inside Aestraea when I should have been sleeping — none of that has a line item. It never does, for indie authors. The labour of making the thing exist is the part that does not get funded. What gets funded is everything required to turn that labour into something you can hold.
I am not telling you this to make you feel guilty. I am telling you because I think you deserve to know what backing an indie book actually means. You are not pre-ordering a product that already exists. You are the reason it gets to exist in the form it deserves, with a cover made with care, with prose checked by a professional, with an ISBN that means it can sit on a library shelf alongside books published by houses with entire departments behind them.
A World Reborn is about 60% written. It will be finished. The campaign runs through 30 June, and everything I have told you here is where your pledge goes when it arrives.
If you have already backed it: thank you. Genuinely. You are in the acknowledgements, and I mean that.
If you have not yet: the campaign is here. Every tier is listed, and nothing is padded.